{"id":1482,"date":"2017-03-06T23:21:20","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T19:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=1482"},"modified":"2017-03-06T23:37:27","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T19:37:27","slug":"new-new-playboy-an-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=1482","title":{"rendered":"New new Playboy: An analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a much bigger splash last winter when Playboy<\/em> announced it would no longer show nude pictorials in its magazine than when it reversed that decision last month.<\/p>\n

Hefner\u2019s had marriages that lasted longer than this.<\/p>\n

With its March\/April 2017 issue, on newsstands now, Playboy<\/em> has gone back to its roots, the non-nude experiment having lasted exactly one year.<\/p>\n

A sigh of relief should be our expected response, no? An April Fool\u2019s joke revealed and survived? Was it all just a publicity stunt? Or did the bean counters who seem to run the enterprise now really think it would be a good idea and then reverse course when the new beans were counted?<\/p>\n

There are several changes in the current issue one might discover on a second or third reading beyond who\u2019s covering what parts of whose body. I mentioned last week that I\u2019m in the issue and in fact I am, not naked but among the letter writers in the opinion section. There has been a dearth of letters to the editor in recent issues and I\u2019m happy to see this section has been expanded.<\/p>\n

Of course I appreciated seeing my own name in this month\u2019s pages. But mine wasn\u2019t the name featured most prominently. That distinction belongs to a certain Mr. Hefner, not Hugh but his youngest son Cooper, 25 years old but now the number two man listed on the masthead, just under his dad\u2019s. His title is \u201cChief Creative Officer,\u201d whatever that means (read: my daddy started the company), a pretty good promotion from two-thirds of the way down the page last month. Cooper\u2019s got a friendly from-the-publisher-type piece in the issue\u2019s early pages, introducing himself (as though we didn\u2019t know) and his<\/em> \u201cPlayboy philosophy.\u201d Honestly, it reads like a bad op-ed in a college newspaper, but at least he seems to be on the right side of freedom. There are the usual jabs at so-called oppression from today\u2019s political types, and the modern obsession with proving one\u2019s goodness by proclaiming a tolerance to gay marriage (the most pressing issue on Earth, if you haven\u2019t heard). Elder Hefner\u2019s original \u201cPlayboy Philosophy\u201d reads more like Ayn Rand than anything else, though for 60 years Playboy<\/em> has been nominally laughing at the political right. Obviously it\u2019s too early to tell exactly how Playboy<\/em> will treat the current administration, though I fear it will miss a golden opportunity by siding more with Hollywood and the mainstream media than with the libertarian millennial it professes to court.<\/p>\n

I look forward to reading (yes, reading) this new<\/em> new era of Playboy<\/em>. It really does look different compared to the past year. They\u2019ve reintroduced content staples such as the \u201cWorld of Playboy\u201d and the \u201cPlayboy Advisor,\u201d and have returned to the scrapbook format that differentiated it from the slick-look magazines it seemed to mimic the past 12 months. (They also stopped that stupid James Franco feature.) The jokes are back, and the one-page \u201cplayback\u201d is now an entire section called \u201cHeritage,\u201d highlighting the magazine\u2019s history, the very idea I think should be promoted while concurrently looking to the future. I like that they stuck with the new paper size, a little wider that the issues prior to 2016, and the quality of the paper has improved as well. The only thing I really find disappointing, other than the out-of-place ad and coupons for Harbor Freight Tools (who let that<\/em> one slip through?) is the quality of the pictures<\/em>. Yes, the photographs are in fact worse even though, yes, one does now get to see boobs. (This is 2017\u2026 they\u2019re not that hard to find.) It seems as though the photographers were trying harder when they were more restricted, and the photos of the past year, most of which had a sort of vintage tint or filter to them, really looked better. Current editors can learn something from that strange year of modesty.<\/p>\n

And when they finally get around to including my <\/em>picture in the mag as opposed to just my name, I\u2019ll insist upon the greatest of care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a much bigger splash last winter when Playboy announced it would no longer show nude pictorials in its magazine than when it reversed that decision last month. Hefner\u2019s had marriages that lasted longer than this. With its March\/April … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1482"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1485,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions\/1485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}